The Mysteriously Magnetic Mazda

Like most normal people, I have a few fears. I have a slight fear of heights, for example, and a related fear of flying, but they are not at all debilitating. I don’t think twice before purchasing plane tickets. I’ll get some butterflies in my stomach when we take off, or if we hit turbulence, or if there’s a noticeable change in velocity, but for the most part I’m just fine.

I have a fear of lightening in the mountains. I love being in the mountains, and I love thunderstorms, but the two of them together are unnerving.

I have a fear of geese. Don’t laugh. When I’m out running and there is a flock of geese strolling down the sidewalk, I will take great pains to make a wide path around them. I have never been personally attacked by a goose, but I can’t shake the thought that geese are angry, unpredictable creatures, and I’d rather not find out that I am right.

I am afraid of earthquakes, which are even more unpredictable than geese.

And I am afraid of being rear-ended. This fear has only developed in the last few years, but somehow I have become hyper-aware of cars behind me whenever I put on my brakes more quickly than usual. I know that sometimes people don’t notice brake lights immediately, and if they take just a second too long to realize that I’ve slowed, they’re going to plow right into me. I worry about this.

In fact, I was thinking about it just yesterday. I was driving along Washtenaw Avenue with an SUV in front of me, clipping along at a normal pace, when the SUV suddenly switched lanes and revealed a long line of cars at a dead stop. I barely had time to react. I slammed on my brakes and managed to bring my velocity to zero a few yards behind the car at the back of the line, and my immediate instinct as I was doing this was to glance in my rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind me. I had (almost) every confidence that I could react quickly enough, but my confidence in the driver behind me wasn’t quite as solid.

Fortunately there was no car behind me, so my rear bumper was safe. But I got to thinking about how awful/sad/funny it would be if I was rear-ended a matter of days after I got my car back from its repairs for its run-in with the missionaries.

So I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry this morning as I was waiting to pull out of my apartment complex this morning and another driver came up behind me, got distracted by a van turning around in the street, and barreled right into me from behind.

Rotten luck.

Fortunately this one’s not as bad as the last. Despite the crunch and the jolt that I heard and felt, the damage is slight, and you probably wouldn’t even notice it if you weren’t looking. Of course, I notice it, and I’m not to thrilled about having to go back to the auto body repair shop and to go through the hassle of it all for the second time in a matter of weeks. And even if it doesn’t look that bad, it’s still costly—over seven hundred dollars costly according to the estimate. Thank goodness for insurance.

But oh well. If the story of the missionaries backing into my car was a good one, I guess it’s now been made even better by having a second incident less than four days after getting the first one taken care of.